Billy Graham died

In all honesty (but I’m always honest, of course), I didn’t know Billy Graham was still alive. It turns out he was 99, and died today at his home in North Carolina. He was known as the “Pastor to Presidents”, and was there for every American President from Harry Truman through Barack Obama. One of the first televangelists, he was a Southern Baptist estimated to have preached to more humans than anyone in the history of Christianity. Through his “crusades” (400 of them in 185 countries), he’s said to have persuaded over 3 million people to “accept Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior.”

What a waste of a life—preaching fiction and delusion to the masses. My sympathies go to his family and friends, but at least one of his sons is continuing the charade.

Many years ago, the Rev. Ian Paisley, firebrand Ulster politician and preacher of hellfire and brimstone was preaching one Sunday on the End Times and the suffering to be endured after the final judgment.

His voice boomed towards the climax of his sermon that on the Day of Judgement “there would be a moaning and a wailing and a gnashing of teeth”…at this dramatic moment an old woman put up her hand and said uttered in consternation “But Dr. Paisley, I have no teeth”. Without missing a beat Paisley replied “Madam, teeth will be provided”.

Story goes that Paisley went to the office of the Prime Minister, John Major, and the latter, exasperated at Paisley’s haranguing, just left his room. Paisley continued delivering his “No Surrender!” spiel to an empty space. When asked why, Paisley, responded that he came to deliver his message to the office of the P.M., so that is what he did.

Another old one involves Ian Paisley being asked the difference between his Free Presbyterians and the Calvinist Presbyterians down the road. He thundered (insert Ulster accent here): “The difference is that the Calvinist Presbyterians believe that you Catholics are domned because ye’re predestined to be domned; whereas we Free Presbyterians believe that you Catholics will be domned on yer merits”.

Sounds very “apocryphal” – I have a feeling I’ve heard that one with different names attached.
When I was just graduated, Paisley launched a campaign titled “Scotland against Sodomy“. Which went down like a lead balloon, generally. A friend of mine from the (locally) infamous “Rock Music Society” came close to causing a Paisley apoplectic fit when it came to the “debate” bit of the meeting. Obviously, Paisley wasn’t going to take questions from the hippies and screaming queens who’d been heckling throughout, but the quiet, pretty blonde girl in the front row looks a very Christian girl, looks demure and obedient ; I’ll take a question from her.
Be very careful of assumptions, Paisley. Crazy Yvonne (for it was she) asked: “Mr Paisley, you’ve concentrated on homosexual men getting sodomised and clearly think that’s a bad thing. But you’ve said nothing about women like me , who like to be sodomised every so often. Why are you interfering with our sexual choices?”
Paisley had no answer, just a rapid escalation through the reds and into the facial purples before leaving.
Crazy Yvonne was dining out on that one for months. Well, liquid dining – double vodka and coke normally.

I wasn’t aware of his association with Cliff Richard until the BBC highlighted it. I don’t know if we can blame Mr Graham for converting our only shot at a British Elvis into a sanctimonious xian ‘rocker’ who became more anodyne and goddy as the years rolled on, perhaps he would have gone that way by himself.

What a travesty and a violation of the US Constitution to have anyone be known as pastor to presidents. It was Graham who was influential in getting “under god” in the pledge of allegiance and “in god we trust” on our money.

Both of these instantly divide us not only in terms of believers and non- believers but also in terms of Christians and everyone else.

Because of Billy we have a nation entangled with religion in clear violation of the 1st amendment.

Opponents to gun violence got it right when they came up with No More Thoughts and Prayers, We Want Action. As I have always said, two hands engaged in work will accomplish much more than 1,000 hands clasped in prayer.

My mother – CoE but educated by nuns for a few years (?!)- went to see him in the 50s I think. He clearly had a broad appeal, particularly among young people in the post-war world. What a pity he could not have been rational…

I don’t doubt his decency but there is a lot of money inn what they do. Billy’s kid is innvolved with Samaritan’s Purse and according to Wiki:

In the fiscal year ending December 2012, Samaritan’s Purse generated over $376 million. Of that amount, 89.3 percent goes directly to projects; 4.3 percent is used for administrative support; and 6.2 percent is spent on fundraising. The organization has received a 4 star rating (out of 4 stars) from the monitoring organization Charity Navigator.[28] The “Consolidated Statement of Activities” section of the organization’s 2014 accountant’s report lists the total revenue as $520.4 million.[29]

So that is around $37.6 million from which I am sure the Grahams derive a very nice living.

The there are the tactics:

In March 2001, The New York Times reported that Samaritan’s Purse had “blurred the line between church and state” in the way it had distributed publicly funded aid to victims of the El Salvador earthquake. Residents from several villages stated they first had to sit through a half-hour prayer meeting before receiving assistance.[32] In a statement, USAID said Samaritan’s Purse had not violated federal guidelines, but emphasized the need for the organization to “maintain adequate and sufficient separation” between prayer sessions and publicly funded activities.

Reminds me of a our own dear Salvation Army – they will give the homeless a meal but they have to say their prayers!

Decency is relative – if you were young, LGBT and got sucked into one of his international revival meetings – he caused huge damage. He changed his message a few times as well including changed support for the rights movement. Waste of a life and ultimately a destructive human being

Graham appeared on Gallup’s list of most admired men and women 55 times since 1955 more than any other individual in the world. He was also an aspiring war criminal. “The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire,” by Cecil Bothwell exposes Graham as a serial warmonger. He describes Rev. Graham as a public figure who: “Undermined the Founders’ skeptical Deism and sought to rebrand the U.S. as a Christian nation, [and] its armies [as] the rightful instruments of [a] Christian crusade and empire.”
In April, l989 a secret letter from Graham, dated April 15, 1969, to president Nixon became public. Here he advocated bombing the dikes in North Vietnam. Bombing would have destroyed much of the Vietnamese rice crop. Nixon administration estimated that this would have killed a million civilians. The letter caused little comment. Graham still got the votes.
In WWII, the German high commissioner in occupied Holland, Seyss-Inquart, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg, in part, for breaching dikes in Holland in WWII.

Regardless of whether or not he actually believed what he preached or whether or not his intentions good, Graham easily ranks among the top 50 people who have caused the most damage to the US in his lifetime. And only his god knows how much damage he caused to other countries he meddled in.

Given his wealth and the wealth of his organizations I’ve no doubt that his motives were not particularly good. Good riddance and I hope his organizations fall on hard times now that he is gone.

He doesn’t seem to have been as horrid a piece of work as “Give him an enema and you could bury him in a match box” Falwell but damn, I’m not sure that bar reaches even a Planck length high.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t he part of the US group of evangelical preachers that persuaded several African nations to introduce anti-gay laws? Think of all the people who suffered because of that.

And not forgetting, of course, the LGBT kids unfortunate enough to grow up in a Southern Baptist community. How many suicides can be laid at his door?

And he was at the forefront of the US anti-choice movement. That has led to the suffering of a lot of women.

I don’t know off hand if Billy Boy was directly involved in those efforts, though he certainly paved the way. Scott Lively is the despicable mass of protoplasm that led the charge to encourage some African nations to introduce anti-gay laws. But Billy Graham was hugely involved in evangelism in Africa for decades, his organizations still are of course, and naturally that includes spreading his contemptible views about LGBTQ. His loathsome son is even worse in that respect. Well, it’s actually looking like in every respect.

I didn’t know the old anti-Semitic crypto-fascist Nixon-enabler was still kickin’ either (though he wasn’t half-bad on civil rights). Rotten as he was, I’m confident he’d’ve drawn the line at Donald Trump, unlike his imbecile regression-toward-the-mean son Franklin. With Trump, the whole religious right has revealed its hypocrisy for all to see, and it’ll cease to be a force in American politics once Trump finally disappears in a flash of lightning and the scent of sulfur.

That said, I did go to one of Graham’s “crusades” back in the ’70s. My grandmother had taken a shine to him on tv, maybe because of his pompadour and slick suits, and I took her and her sisters (my great aunts) down to the ballpark to see him when he came to town. (I had quit believing in any god(s) by then myself, but was deep into my try-anything-once phase, something I’ve never quite outgrown.) The three nice Catholic gals I brought poured their hard-earned mean green into the bucket passed near the end of the revival, right along with every other sucker in the stadium.

Funny you should say that. My dad used to tell a story about setting up one of his buddies with one of my mom’s sisters when they were dating and that, when they went parking at the end of a double date, my aunt “broke out the beads” (i.e., started saying the rosary).

The “Nixon Tapes” revealed that he was a callous anti-Semite who hated Jews. Also, when the US invaded Afghanistan back in 2001, Billy Graham and is son tried to organize the evangelization, and conversion to Christianity, of the Afghan people, which was total madness, at best.

I have never liked him nor his fire and brimstone guilt-trip-laying sermons.

According to a college friend whose father was a regional director of Baptist organization, Graham was sincere in his belief (unlike many). Interestingly, my friend was an atheist/agnostic and a conscientious objector during the vietnam war. He is now a physician.

Maybe Billy saw the results of that special election in Kentucky for a state house seat. Democrat Linda Belcher won in this heavily republican state with 68% to 32% for the losing republican candidate. After that he saw no reason to carry on.

The circumstances behind this special election are extraordinary. The seat was vacated when Rep. Dan Johnson committed suicide after the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting published a story saying he had been accused of molesting a 17-year-old girl at the Fern Creek church where he was pastor. The story also linked him to arson cases and alcohol violations at the church.

His widow, Rebecca Johnson, who was running to replace him, is now claiming voter fraud after her opponent won almost 70% of the vote.

Graham never spoke out against the Vietnam War. Instead he compared the carnage of automobile/highway deaths to the carnage created by his crusade against Communism. Graham attacked the policies of the New Deal, Fair Deal and won the support of William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers backed Graham.
Graham had little to do with Martin Luther King’s work for social justice. Graham was a pie in the sky, by and by guy. He was beloved by the rich because he never criticized them. His son, Franklin, is a Trump supporter. Both of them did not and do not respect the First Amendment.

I’ve certainly got no love lost on Graham, but to give the demon his due, he did desegregate his revival audiences in the 1950s, right after Brown v. Board of Education, long before the regular Southern Baptists saw the light on civil rights.

I don’t doubt Graham’s acuity in seeing green over black or white. But in those days, he lost more in revenue from bigots staying away than he gained from black folk flocking to his revivals. Were it otherwise, Jim Crow would’ve collapsed under its own economic weight (as libertarians suppose).

This seventy-five year old Southern atheist asks you to remember to speak only good of the dead and to say of Billy Graham, “Bless his heart, he was wrong about Afghanistan.” I think it’s a cultural difference.

I don’t think he was a bad man merely deluded by religion. Like most people he was both good and bad.

He opposed segregation starting in the 50s and traveled with Martin Luther King Jr to promote a relatively progressive Christianity. Not a great legacy but a lot better than most Southern Baptists of his age.

Anyway, I can’t help but wonder: assuming that there is anything like a grain of truth in his conversion numbers … isn’t it a darn shame that someone with that sort of charisma couldn’t have used it for something good, like encouraging literacy or vaccinations or something?

Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, is far more arch-conservative than he;
Billy himself adopted some more liberal views late in his career (in particular promoting environmentalism and allowing for genuine goodness in other religions), and he got some backlash from ultra-conservative evangelicals as a consequence. But it seems Franklin is acceptable to them.
However, Billy remained unrepentently anti-feminist and anti-gay till the end of his days, though he dropped the anti-Semitism of his early days later in life!

Grant Wacker once called BG the “Great Legitimator” “By then his presence conferred status on presidents, acceptability on wars, shame on racial prejudice, desirability on decency, dishonor on indecency, and prestige on civic events.”
After the Nixon years, Graham separated himself a bit from politics, feeling he had been manipulated by Richard Nixon. He reduced his involvement with presidents after that.

An absolutely fascinating(!!) biography of Graham’s wife, Ruth Bell Graham, was written by murder mystery novelist Patricia Cornwell, who had spent a brief part of her teen years as a foster-child of the Grahams. She had bonded will with Ruth, and they remained lifelong friends. (Cornwell is both bisexual and bipartisan, having been married to both genders and supported candidates from both parties.) Ruth Graham turns out to have a slight wild side- Cornwell reveals that she was a motorcycle enthusiast. I understand the Grahams found some of the material embarassing, but don’t know specifics.

I have to allow that Graham was certainly a gifted orator, but I have a hard time believing in any kind of religious conversion involving people lining up on a football fiedl.

In lieu of the “one funeral at a time” metric for progress of reason (painfully slow as it is),I find some relief by observing improvement in the availability of useful information for all (especially future adults). Robertson, Graham, Khomeni,Osteen, Bin Laden,Roberts (Oral Roberts, that is) and way too many other scaremongering extortionists to mention here may have gotten away with grandiose larceny, but their means of doing so are not sustainable.

Billy pandered to the rich and famous, like them all. He built a business enterprise that was passed down to his children. One child, Franklin, is a notorious bigot and hater. And for the last decade or so, he was held captive (IMO) by his children so as to not interfere with their plundering of his assets. JMO.

I wonder if he ever read the Sumerian Tablets? I would really hate to be a Christian minister in the days to come… I grew up as a Christian with many unanswred questions as a kid, being told I just had to believe and have faith. The Sumerian tablets answred those questions… I was pissed at first. The bible does have many truths, one being “the truth will set you free” and “when you are free, you are free indeed”. After reading the Sumerian tablets, I still know Jesus was a real person, but I don’t believe he said what the bible says he did. I don’t believe Mosus wrote the first four books of the Old Testiment, nor did the authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John ever personally know Jesus. The God Christians are supposed to worship is NOT the Creator of All or of man. In the beginning, The Sumerians didn’t worship their “gods” because they weren’t here to be worshipped. In fact, their “gods” had their own “God” who was the creator of all. I could go on and on… There are many great documentaries on YouTube. Start with Forbidden Sumerican History then Lloyd Pye’s documentary “Everything You Know Is Wrong”… Gerald Clark is very good. Those two documentaries allowed me to climb out of the bottle, throuth the funnel and look out into the universe and see who we really are and what we are actually capable of. That’s what happens, you know. We fall through a funnel into a little bottle. Like a marketing funnel system…

Sorry, I had to vent somewhat. But I do get a little crazy when I think of the BILLIONS of dollars spent by MILLIONS of people. How so many wars have been fought in the name of God… As “Jehovah” and “Allah” intended so man would kill each other off. OK, I will stop now. 🙂

Thanks for the rant. It’s inspiring. I just read Bart Erman’s “Forged” which discusses how almost nobody is who they said they were in biblical history. I wish Graham had read all Erman’s books. But of course, according to Hitch, he probably would admit he himself was a fraud but didn’t care.

As a Christian I do not believe BG to be a Christian. More a “cash cow”. He is reportedly, from several sources, a 33 degree Freemason (they worship Lucifer but you only find that out when you climb the ranks). I would steer clear of the teachings of anyone ingratiating themselves with the Queen, the Clintons, the Pope… Illuminati central.